Stevie Palmateer, Chief Technology Officer at LeafLink – Interview Series

While many established professionals in the American cannabis industry and its ancillary businesses come from diverse backgrounds, few have prior experience in the high-stakes, billion-dollar world of Wall Street. Stevie Palmateer, a longtime software engineer, brings that rare expertise, having worked at financial powerhouses like Morgan Stanley (MS ) and Credit Suisse (CS ) . Palmateer currently serves as Chief Technology Officer at LeafLink, a wholesale cannabis commerce platform operating in over 30 markets across the U.S.

What subjects did you study during your time in college, and what initially interested you in computer science and software engineering?

I started programming back in 2000 during the dot-com boom. My mom worked at Lockheed Martin (LMT ), and they hosted a ‘Bring Your Daughter to Work Day,’ where I was introduced to programming. From that moment, I was hooked. I sought out opportunities to code throughout middle and high school, so majoring in computer science was a natural choice. However, I also developed a strong interest in business and leadership, which led me to minor in Business Administration. That combination ultimately guided me to launch my career on Wall Street.

What organizations and activities were you involved in while attending East Carolina University, and how did those experiences better prepare you for your career?

I’ve always been passionate about team sports, and that carried into college, where I played several intramural and club sports, including flag football and soccer. Beyond athletics, I was actively involved in student government and led the local chapter of Invisible Children at ECU, organizing art auctions and charity events in collaboration with local creatives. The combination of teamwork and goal-oriented collaboration in sports, along with the leadership and organizational experience I gained from running the chapter, helped prepare me for the leadership and managerial roles I would take on in my career.

I’m pretty sure you’re one of the first cannabis professionals I’ve interviewed who has previously worked for banking juggernauts such as Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. What were your various roles with those companies, and what were the frequent software engineering/computer science issues that those giant companies faced?

Yeah, my career has definitely taken me all over! That said, the common thread throughout my first seven years on Wall Street to now has been financial technology. When I first joined LeafLink, it was to help build and launch the Payments solutions we now offer, as well as prepare for Banking.

At Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, along with my time at Levvel (now Endava), I worked on building pricing engines, risk systems, underwriting systems, P&L reporting and data visualizations, and integrations with third parties like Bloomberg and Zelle. Low latency (how fast the systems can process the logic and get a result back) was extremely important, as well as the amount of data we were processing at a time. Before leaving Levvel, I helped design and launch a digital bank for a major financial services company.

So, moving into cannabis felt like a natural progression—combining my fintech background with my genuine interest in the medicinal aspects of plant medicine and my passion for social justice and equitable access to capital.

What roles did you fill while employed at Levvel.io, and what were the most common industries you consulted with? Would you say that one industry had more issues related to software engineering over other industries, or were the technology-related issues common throughout all industries?

Yeah, consulting was really interesting—not just for gaining exposure to different business problems, but also for seeing firsthand how many industries face fundamentally similar challenges when it comes to building and maintaining software.

When I joined Levvel, I started as an individual contributor, stepping down from my team lead role at Morgan Stanley to get back to hands-on development and familiarize myself with more modern technologies. I quickly moved into a department lead role, helping scale the company. As I mentioned earlier, my primary focus remained fintech, working with both big banks and smaller retail institutions. But I also had the opportunity to branch into digital media, helping CNN design their new content management system while maintaining their legacy infrastructure.

Legacy software is definitely a common thread across industries—and something we’re tackling at LeafLink as well. Balancing the need to pay down tech debt while maintaining speed to market with new products, all while supporting a rapidly evolving business and technology landscape, is an ongoing challenge!”

Prior to joining the LeafLink team, what initially caught your professional attention about the cannabis industry? Did you ever imagine you’d go from the hectic chaos of Wall Street to the ancillary cannabis industry in just a few years?

Never. LOL. My journey into cannabis was deeply connected to my personal growth. In 2019, I spent a lot of time focusing on my mental and physical health and discovered that plant medicine played a pivotal role in helping me navigate that journey holistically. Then 2020 brought a massive shift for the world, and with it, an urge for me to do more purposeful work.

That’s when LeafLink came into my life—it felt like synchronicity. While there’s still so much work to be done to help mature the industry and support those impacted by the War on Drugs, I’m incredibly proud of what my team and I have been able to contribute.

So when did you join the LeafLink team, and what caught your interest in the platform?

I joined LeafLink in September 2020. What drew me in was not only my personal interest in the industry but also the mission behind the company. I was especially intrigued by how well it aligned with my experience—helping bring access to liquidity to businesses that need it. On top of that, the opportunity to build both a platform and a team from the ground up was incredibly exciting—every engineering leader’s dream!

How was the LeafLink platform different from other similar platforms you’ve worked with and/or designed previously in your career?

Because cannabis isn’t federally legal, there are significant restrictions when it comes to third-party financial services and partnered technology. When I first joined, I thought, ‘No problem—we’ll integrate with an enterprise-ready payment processor like Stripe and use Plaid for secure bank account storage and validation.’ But the reality was a hard no from those providers.

That forced us to think outside the box—and, in some cases, reinvent the wheel. I always say that LeafLink isn’t pushing the boundaries of emerging technology in the way OpenAI is, but by the very nature of what we do, we are an innovative company. We’re constantly piecing together existing solutions in new ways to solve challenges unique to this industry.

That said, in the 4.5 years I’ve been at LeafLink, I’ve seen third-party providers start to come around. The day we integrated with Plaid was a huge milestone for us!

How does the LeafLink platform assist cannabis businesses in their multifaceted daily operations? How would the platform change depending on the size of the cannabis business?

We focus on operational efficiency and giving our customers back valuable time—which, in turn, translates to dollars. LeafLink started by building tools for sellers and sales enablement, but we’ve since evolved to support financial departments and retailers, streamlining AR/AP, purchasing workflows and decision-making.

B2B transactions naturally have lower throughput than B2C, but the volume and complexity of data we process—especially for multi-state operators—require sophisticated approaches to data processing and storage. Ensuring performance and responsiveness at scale is critical to meeting our customers’ expectations.

With ongoing industry consolidation and the evolving segmentation of customers using our platform, getting this right has never been more important. It’s a key area where we’re actively investing our time and resources.

Because the regulations surrounding recreational cannabis can change depending on the state, how does the LeafLink system alter itself to be compliant with whatever regulations may be in place for one particular state but not another?

We build our platform with a modular and composable architecture, allowing us to reuse common components and code workflows while tailoring solutions for unique business requirements, such as regulatory challenges. This approach applies across everything—from systems architecture down to code design.

For example, our deep integrations with seed-to-sale systems like METRC and BioTrack follow this principle, ensuring compliance while maintaining flexibility. Similarly, our licensing service continuously validates and verifies active licenses using multiple data sources, applying algorithms to ensure that transactions only occur between properly authorized parties.

We take the same approach with tax rules and financial regulations, such as California’s Commercial Financing Disclosures, building adaptable solutions that keep our customers compliant across different state requirements.”

If a federal rescheduling were to occur eventually and cannabis went from Schedule I to Schedule III, how do you envision platforms such as LeafLink changing? Would there be even more services offered after the rescheduling?

I don’t think rescheduling would significantly change our platform. However, I do believe it would benefit our customers, as they’d be able to handle their taxes differently—potentially freeing up more liquidity. They are currently being taxed at rates much higher than other businesses since they are unable to deduct ordinary business expenses from their federal taxes. We already integrate with accounting systems like QuickBooks, so this could be a natural extension of our platform’s capabilities to streamline their back-office processes.

Thank you for joining us, Stevie! For more information on LeafLink and its services, please visit its website.